Scene Kid Quotes

For at least twenty minutes she handed out the story. The youngest kids were soothed by her voice, and everyone else saw visions of the whistler running from the scene. Liesel did not. The book thief saw only the mechanics of the words--their bodies stranded on the paper, beaten down for her to walk on. Somewhere, too, in the gaps between a period and the next capital letter, there was also Max. She remembered reading to him when he was sick. It he in the basement? she wondered. Or is he stealing a glimpse of the sky again?

He had black fingernails and drove a hearse. Everything about him cried out, 'Look at me, look at me,' and when you looked at him, he would snap, 'Who the fuck are you looking at?' If you subscribe to the idea that addiction is a disease, it is startling to see how many of these children- paranoid, anxious, bruised, tremulous, withered, in some cases psychotic - are seriously ill, slowly dying. We'd never allow such a scene if these kids had any other disease. They would be in a hospital, not on the streets.

Do you know who W.H. Auden was, Mr. Iscariot? W.H. Auden was a poet who once said, “God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame reciting by heart the poems you would have written had your life been good”…She was my poem, Mr. Iscariot. Her and the kids. But mostly her. You cashed in for silver, Mr. Iscariot. But me? Me…I threw away gold. That’s a fact. That’s a natural fact.

He's teaching her arithmetic, He said it was his mission, He kissed her once and said, "Now that's addition." And as he added smack by smack In silent satisfaction, She sweetly gave the kisses back and said, "Now that's subtraction." Then he kissed her, she kissed him, Without an explanation, And both together smiled and said, "That's multiplication." Then Dad appeared upon the scene and Made a quick decision. He kicked that kid three blocks away And said, "That's long division!

The radio played “Groove Is in the Heart,” which is a radio’s way of saying it couldn’t care less about the mood of a scene.

The air was so thick with crumbs that it was like a scene from the horror film that cakes would make if they had video cameras and thumbs.

Doug returned five minutes later and shook his head. "Sorry kid. She's single, but she doesn't think you're her type. She's into the Goth and vampire scene. You're too mainstream for her." I was sipping a glass of water and nearly choked on it. "That," said Peter, as soon as Doug was gone, "is what we call irony." "How is that possible?" exclaimed Cody. "I am a vampire. I should be exactly what she wants." "Yeah, but you don't look like one," I said. If Gabrielle had been a Trekkie, he might have had a shot tonight.

Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they're reenacting this scene behind the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They're saying to themselves, 'Of course it's our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop of four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundres acres of rain forest -- and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?

I think we’re all just copying what we see. Scenes from movies. Feelings that songs say we’re supposed to have. Fights that our parents have. We just reenact them. And of course they’re all reenacting stuff, too.

But: all journeys were return journeys. The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles. The man who says, "I've got a wife and kids" is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan. But he does not know - how could he? - that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself; and travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography. From there any further travel makes a beeline to confession, the embarrassed monologue in a deserted bazaar. The anonymous hotel room in a strange city...

Look, I’m gonna be upfront with you, kid. I’m not looking for a fast screw or casual hook-ups. I’m tired of that scene.” “Because blinding orgasms are so fucking bothersome,

The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through rapid changes of light to show morning, noon, and night - throb off and on furiously with day and dark, and everybody is driven like mad to keep up with that passing of fake time; awful scramble of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night so you barely get your eyes closed before the dorm light's screaming at you to get up and start the scramble again, go like a sonofabitch this way, going through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees everybody is right up to the breaking point, and she slacks off on the throttle, eases off the pace on that clock-dial, like some kid been fooling with the moving-picture projection machine and finally got tired watching the film run at ten times its natural speed, got bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk and turned it back to normal.

Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets, college kids were planning their next ski trip and discussing the new Police album. We could have been in any city in Japan. Transplant this coffee shop scene to Yokohama or Fukuoka and nothing would seem out of place. In spite of which -- or, rather, all the more because -- here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here. Of course, by the same token, I couldn't really say I belonged to Tokyo and its coffee shops. But I had never felt this loneliness there. I could drink my coffee, read my book, pass the time of day without any special thought, all because I was part of the regular scenery. Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I'd come to reclaim myself.

Initially I had been attracted to punk and anarchism because I saw them as a means to make a positive change, where everyone was equal. While there were some people in the scene who upheld those values, the more punks I dealt with, the more I realized that most of them were privileged white kids taking advantage of this idealism.

When I got to school the next morning I had stepped only one foot in the quad when he spotted me and nearly tackled me to the ground. “Jamie!” he hollered, rushing across the lawn without caring the least bit about the scene he was creating. The next thing I knew, my feet were off the ground and I was squished so tightly in Ryan’s arms that I could barely breathe. “Okay, Ryan?” I coughed in a hushed tone. “This is exactly the kind of thing that can get you killed.” “I don’t care, I’m not letting go. Don’t ever disappear like that again!” he scolded, but his voice was more relieved than angry. “It’s been days! You had your mother worried sick!” “My mother?” I questioned sarcastically. Ryan laughed as he finally set me back on my feet. “Okay, fine, me too.” He still wouldn’t let go of me, though. He was gripping my arms while he looked at me with those eyes, and that smile… You know, being all Ryan-ish. And then, when I got lost in the moment, he totally took advantage of how whipped I was and he kissed me. The jerk. He just pulled my face to his right then and there, in the middle of a crowded quad full of students, where I could have accidentally unleashed an electrical storm at any moment. And okay, maybe I liked it, and maybe I even needed it, but still! You can’t just go kissing Jamie Baker whenever you want, even if you are Ryan Miller! “Ryan!” I yelled as soon as I was able to pull away from him—which admittedly took a minute. “I’m sorry.” Ryan laughed with this big dopey grin on his face and then kissed me some more. I had to push him away from me. “Don’t be sorry, just stop!” I realized I was screaming at him when I felt a hundred different pairs of eyes on me. I tried to ignore the audience that Ryan seemed oblivious to and dropped the audio a few decibels. “I wasn’t kidding when I said this has to stop. Look, I will be your friend. I want to be your friend. But that’s it. We can’t be anything more. It’ll never work.” Ryan watched me for a minute and then whispered, “Don’t do that.” I was shocked to hear the sudden emotion in his voice. “Don’t give up.” It was hopeless. “Fine!” I snapped. “I’ll be your stupid girlfriend!” Big shocker, me giving Ryan his way, I know. But let’s face it—it’s just what I do best. I had to at least act a little tough, though. “But!” I said in the harshest voice I was capable of. “You can’t ever touch me unless I say. No more tackling me, and especially no more surprise kissing.” He actually laughed at my request. “No promises.” Stupid, cocky boyfriend. “You’re crazy. You know that, right?” Ryan got this big cheesy smile on his face and said, “Crazy about you.” “Ugh,” I groaned. “Would you be serious for a minute? Why do you insist on putting your life in danger?” “Because I like you.” His stupid grin was infectious. I wanted to be angry, but how could I with him looking at me like that? “I’m not worth it, you know,” I said stubbornly. “I have issues. I’m unstable.” “You’re cute when you’re unstable,” Ryan said, “and I like your issues.” The stupid boy was straight-up giddy now. But he was so cute that I cracked a smile despite myself. “You really are crazy,” I muttered.

Stabler and his wife dance all over the house, mouse masks on their faces. The kids stare at the scene in horror, and run to their room, where one is busy forgetting and the other is remembering what will, one day, be a chapter in her well-received memoir.

President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right. Many

One day about a month ago, I really hit bottom. You know, I just felt that in a Godless universe, I didn't want to go on living. Now I happen to own this rifle, which I loaded, believe it or not, and pressed it to my forehead. And I remember thinking, at the time, I'm gonna kill myself. Then I thought, what if I'm wrong? What if there is a God? I mean, after all, nobody really knows that. But then I thought, no, you know, maybe is not good enough. I want certainty or nothing. And I remember very clearly, the clock was ticking, and I was sitting there frozen with the gun to my head, debating whether to shoot. [The gun fires accidentally, shattering a mirror] All of a sudden, the gun went off. I had been so tense my finger had squeezed the trigger inadvertently. But I was perspiring so much the gun had slid off my forehead and missed me. And suddenly neighbors were, were pounding on the door, and, and I don't know, the whole scene was just pandemonium. And, uh, you know, I-I-I ran to the door, I-I didn't know what to say. You know, I was-I was embarrassed and confused and my-my-my mind was r-r-racing a mile a minute. And I-I just knew one thing. I-I-I had to get out of that house, I had to just get out in the fresh air and-and clear my head. And I remember very clearly, I walked the streets. I walked and I walked. I-I didn't know what was going through my mind. It all seemed so violent and un-unreal to me. And I wandered for a long time on the Upper West Side, you know, and-and it must have been hours. You know, my-my feet hurt, my head was-was pounding, and-and I had to sit down. I went into a movie house. I-I didn't know what was playing or anything. I just, I just needed a moment to gather my thoughts and, and be logical and put the world back into rational perspective. And I went upstairs to the balcony, and I sat down, and, you know, the movie was a-a-a film that I'd seen many times in my life since I was a kid, and-and I always, uh, loved it. And, you know, I'm-I'm watching these people up on the screen and I started getting hooked on the film, you know. And I started to feel, how can you even think of killing yourself. I mean isn't it so stupid? I mean, l-look at all the people up there on the screen. You know, they're real funny, and-and what if the worst is true. What if there's no God, and you only go around once and that's it. Well, you know, don't you want to be part of the experience? You know, what the hell, it's-it's not all a drag. And I'm thinkin' to myself, geez, I should stop ruining my life - searching for answers I'm never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts. And, you know, after, who knows? I mean, you know, maybe there is something. Nobody really knows. I know, I know maybe is a very slim reed to hang your whole life on, but that's the best we have. And then, I started to sit back, and I actually began to enjoy myself.

A boy, if he's lucky, discovers his limitations across a leisurely passage of years, with a self-awareness arriving slowly. That way, at least he has plenty of time to heroically imagine himself first. Most boys unfold in this natural, measured way, growing up with at least one adult on the scene who can convincingly fake being all-powerful, omniscient, and unfailingly protective for a kid's first decade or so, providing an invaluable canopy of reachable stars and monsters that are comfortably make-believe.

One reason we struggle with insecurity: we’re comparing our behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel. —STEVEN FURTICK

Eli was a scene kid, the type that was just a little too into Panic! at the Disco to be trusted.

There has to be something wrong when spurning reproduction doesn’t make Gabriella and me the “mavericks” we’d both have prided ourselves as in our younger days but standard issue for our era. Surely the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy—a lack of faith in the whole human enterprise. In its darkest form, the growing cohort of childless couples determined to throw all their money at Being Here Now—to take that step aerobics class, visit Tanzania, put an addition on the house while making no effort to ensure there’s someone around to inherit the place when the party is over—has the quality of the mad, slightly hysterical scenes of gleeful abandon that fiction

When Adam accepted the fruit of that tree, he succumbed to the temptation to live without limit - and so the person who offered him that fruit is called "Life". Ishmael nodded. "Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they're reenacting this scene beside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They're saying to themselves, 'Of course it's our right to apportion life on this planes as we please. Why stop at four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest - and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?

For me, reading that scene never fails to bring on a brief, scalding instant of recognition in recalling exactly what it was like to be a tiny little kid, your whole sense of being so lumpy and vulnerable that the smallest things were everything, and the everything could be so unspeakably wonderful, and the wonderful could be snatched away in an instant, leaving a big ragged hole in your universe just like the one in Laura’s dress.

I’ve never actually been on one, but Simon says it’s just a flock of mortified kids cringing while their parents ask questions. Apparently, Simon’s dad asked the tour guide at Duke to “please elaborate on the campus gay scene.” “I wanted to fucking die,” Simon told me.

It sometimes strikes me that there is only one taboo left in young adult literature. By and large, no one complains any more when we write about drugs or sex. We can write about masturbation; terminal illness; the horrors of war; illegal organ transplants; matricide; the chilly delights of necrophilia; scenes of locker-room bukkake – none of this raises an eyebrow. No, the one thing which still causes people pause – the final hurdle – the last frontier – the one element which still gets a few adult readers up in arms about whether a book is appropriate for kids – is intelligence. Some adults still balk at the assumption that our readers, the teenagers of this country, are smart, and curious, and get a kick out of knowing things. One of the great things about writing YA today is that this is changing.

Just do what he says!" the youngest guy said. Quickly they all started to undress until the five men were standing there, naked. They were being held at bay by an old guy and a kid, neither of whom was wearing a shirt. It was a pretty ridiculous scene, lika a game of strip poker that was going horribly wrong.

I think life is a lot different for alternative kids nowadays. Texting and the internet mean that being a Goth or something means you're part of a big social scene, it's an inclusive thing. Back then, we all just went our different ways in the afterglow,wishing each other all the best with the next ten years of bullying.

If you subscribe to the idea that addiction is a disease, it is startling to see how many of these children—paranoid, anxious, bruised, tremulous, withered, in some cases psychotic—are seriously ill, slowly dying. We'd never allow such a scene if these kids had any other disease. They would be in a hospital, not on the streets.

When I describe this scene to Michel Cohen, the French pediatrician in New York, he knows immediately what I’m talking about. He says these mothers are speaking loudly to flaunt what good parents they are. The practice of narrated play is so common that Cohen included a section in his parenting book called Stimulation, which essentially tells mothers to cut it out. “Periods of playing and laughing should alternate naturally with periods of peace and quiet,” Cohen writes. “You don’t have to talk, sing, or entertain constantly.” Whatever your view on whether this intensive supervision is good for kids, it seems to make child care less pleasant for mothers.2 Just watching it is exhausting

It used to be, as far as I can tell, that Christian parents basically tried to feed their kids, clothe them, teach them about Jesus, and keep them away from explosives. Now our kids have to sleep on their backs (no, wait, their tummies; no, never mind, their backs), while listening to Baby Mozart and surrounded by scenes of Starry, Starry Night.

What about this, then?” The metal surface rippled at his touch, stretching and splitting into a million thin wires that made it look like a giant version of one of those pin art toys Sophie used to play with as a kid. He tapped his fingers in a quick rhythm, and the pins shifted and sank, forming highs and lows and smooth, flat stretches. Sophie couldn’t figure out what she was seeing until he tapped a few additional beats and tiny pricks of light flared at the ends of each wire, bathing the scene in vibrant colors and marking everything with glowing labels. “It’s a map,” she murmured, making a slow circle around the table. And not just any map. A 3-D map of the Lost Cities. She’d never seen her world like that before, with everything spread out across the planet in relation to everything else. Eternalia, the elvin capital that had likely inspired the human myths of Shangri-la, was much closer to the Sanctuary than she’d realized, nestled into one of the valleys of the Himalayas—while the special animal preserve was hidden inside the hollowed-out mountains. Atlantis was deep under the Mediterranean Sea, just like the human legends described, and it looked like Mysterium was somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. The Gateway to Exile was in the middle of the Sahara desert—though the prison itself was buried in the center of the earth. And Lumenaria… “Wait. Is Lumenaria one of the Channel Islands?” she asked, trying to compare what she was seeing against the maps she’d memorized in her human geography classes. “Yes and no. It’s technically part of the same archipelago. But we’ve kept that particular island hidden, so humans have no idea it exists—well, beyond the convoluted stories we’ve occasionally leaked to cause confusion.

A cell phone rang from the end table to my right and Kristen bolted up straight. She put her beer on the coffee table and dove across my lap for her phone, sprawling over me. My eyes flew wide. I’d never been that close to her before. I’d only ever touched her hand. If I pushed her down across my knees, I could spank her ass. She grabbed her phone and whirled off my lap. “It’s Sloan. I’ve been waiting for this call all day.” She put a finger to her lips for me to be quiet, hit the Talk button, and put her on speaker. “Hey, Sloan, what’s up?” “Did you send me a potato?” Kristen covered her mouth with her hand and I had to stifle a snort. “Why? Did you get an anonymous potato in the mail?” “Something is seriously wrong with you,” Sloan said. “Congratulations, he put a ring on it. PotatoParcel.com.” She seemed to be reading a message. “You found a company that mails potatoes with messages on them? Where do you find this stuff?” Kristen’s eyes danced. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you have the other thing though?” “Yeeeess. The note says to call you before I open it. Why am I afraid?” Kristen giggled. “Open it now. Is Brandon with you?” “Yes, he’s with me. He’s shaking his head.” I could picture his face, that easy smile on his lips. “Okay, I’m opening it. It looks like a paper towel tube. There’s tape on the—AHHHHHH! Are you kidding me, Kristen?! What the hell!” Kristen rolled forward, putting her forehead to my shoulder in laughter. “I’m covered in glitter! You sent me a glitter bomb? Brandon has it all over him! It’s all over the sofa!” Now I was dying. I covered my mouth, trying to keep quiet, and I leaned into Kristen, who was howling, our bodies shaking with laughter. I must not have been quiet enough though. “Wait, who’s with you?” Sloan asked. Kristen wiped at her eyes. “Josh is here.” “Didn’t he have a date tonight? Brandon told me he had a date.” “He did, but he came back over after.” “He came back over?” Her voice changed instantly. “And what are you two doing? Remember what we talked about, Kristen…” Her tone was taunting. Kristen glanced at me. Sloan didn’t seem to realize she was on speaker. Kristen hit the Talk button and pressed the phone to her ear. “I’ll call you tomorrow. I love you!” She hung up on her and set her phone down on the coffee table, still tittering. “And what did you two talk about?” I asked, arching an eyebrow. I liked that she’d talked about me. Liked it a lot. “Just sexually objectifying you. The usual,” she said, shrugging. “Nothing a hot fireman like you can’t handle.” A hot fireman like you.I did my best to hide my smirk. “So do you do this to Sloan a lot?” I asked. “All the time. I love messing with her. She’s so easily worked up.” She reached for her beer. I chuckled. “How do you sleep at night knowing she’ll be finding glitter in her couch for the next month?” She took a swig of her beer. “With the fan on medium.” My laugh came so hard Stuntman Mike looked up and cocked his head at me. She changed the channel and stopped on HBO. Some show. There was a scene with rose petals down a hallway into a bedroom full of candles. She shook her head at the TV. “See, I just don’t get why that’s romantic. You want flower petals stuck to your ass? And who’s gonna clean all that shit up? Me? Like, thanks for the flower sex, let’s spend the next half an hour sweeping?” “Those candles are a huge fire hazard.” I tipped my beer toward the screen. “Right? And try getting wax out of the carpet. Good luck with that.” I looked at the side of her face. “So what do you think is romantic?” “Common sense,” she answered without thinking about it. “My wedding wouldn’t be romantic. It would be entertaining. You know what I want at my wedding?” she said, looking at me. “I want the priest from The Princess Bride. The mawage guy.

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN AN ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT KIND OF PERSON. HAVING BEEN A PART OF THE HARD CORE PUNK SCENE AS A KID AND LIVING MY WHOLE LIFE IN VARIOUS UNDERGROUND OR OUTSIDER SCENES, I’VE LONG BEEN EXPOSED TO “QUESTION AUTHORITY” TYPES OF THINKING. IT’S REALLY MORE THAT I FELT THIS WAY TOWARDS SOCIETY THAT DROVE ME TO VEGANISM THAN THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

A MAN WON THE WHITE HOUSE WITH ANGER AND HATE AND OUR KIDS WATCHED IT HAPPEN. NOW IT’S OUR JOB TO LET THEM WATCH US FIGHT BACK.

You’re not more punk because you wear leather jackets. You’re not more metal because you have long hair. You’re not more rock and roll because you have tattoos

From an as of yet untitled work: '“Come on,” he guided her towards a diner down the street where throngs of young people ebbed and flowed in great flocks of individuality turned conformity. The ravers, the punks, the goths, the preps, the emo kids, the jocks, the freaks, the geeks, and so many others. They looked like schools of fish colliding and drifting in the barnacled reef of the grafittied club scene.

I used to have a pretty dim view of humanity,” Tony said. “But since I started traveling—particularly to places where I anticipated being treated badly—I am on balance pretty convinced that generally speaking the human race are doing the best they can to be as good as they can, under the circumstances, whatever they may be. I guess my hope is the more people see of the world, in person hopefully, or even on television, they see ordinary people doing ordinary things, so when news happens at least they have a better idea of who we’re talking about. Put a face to some empathy, to some kinship, to some understanding. This surely is a good thing. I hope it’s a useful thing.” “And this is why a show like yours is terrific,” the president said. “Because it reminds people that actually there’s a whole bunch of the world that on a daily basis is going about its business, eating at restaurants, taking their kids to school, trying to make ends meet, playing games. The same way we are back home.

You were born on a moving train. And even though it feels like you're standing still, time is sweeping past you, right where you sit. But once in a while you look up, and actually feel the inertia, and watch as the present turns into a memory —as if some future you is already looking back on it. Dès Vu. One day you’ll remember this moment, and it’ll mean something very different. Maybe you’ll cringe and laugh, or brim with pride, aching to return. or notice some detail hidden in the scene, a future landmark making its first appearance or discreetly taking its final bow. So you try to sense it ahead of time, looking for clues, as if you’re walking through the memory while it’s still happening, feeling for all the world like a time traveler. The world around you is secretly strange: some details are charming and dated, others precious and irretrievable, but all fade into the quaint texture of the day. You try to read the faces around you, each fretting about the day’s concerns, not yet realizing that this world is already out of their hands. That it doesn’t have to be this way, it just sort of happened, and everything will soon be completely different. Because you really are a time traveler, leaping into the future in little tentative steps. Just a kid stuck in a strange land without a map, With nothing to do but soak in the moment and take one last look before moving on. But another part of you is already an old man, looking back on things. Waiting at the door for his granddaughter, who’s trying to make her way home for a visit. You are two people still separated by an ocean of time, Part of you bursting to talk about what you saw, Part of you longing to tell you what it means.

It seems almost like America wants their boys hurt. That they need that. That guy who writes books about the wolf and the boy: every book has a scene where the kid gets caught in an avalanche or a freak blizzard. Invariably, the kid winds up naked and alone and bleeding to death and it's only the effort of the wolf that saves him. The boy can never do it himself. If they did that with a female character in a long set of books like that, the feminists would be up in arms. But does anyone mind it when it's a little boy?

Emo developed out of the punk scene, and they generally wear black. There is, however, a great deal of angst in their music, with dramatic vocals leaving audiences at live gigs sobbing or screaming. There’s a lot of self-loathing and despair in this culture - hence the self-harm slitting of the wrists, although it's more like little kitten scratches - but to be honest a bigger bunch of dickheads you couldn’t hope to find. Can you imagine walking out of a gig by ‘Forever the Sickest Kids,’ or ‘City of Caterpillar’ or ‘….. And you will Know us by the Trail of Dead’ balling your eyes out? I mean ….. Really!!

MacKaye never told anyone to get off the stage. Sometimes this encouraged a rapid and irreversible descent into chaos, but usually it just meant a steady stream of stage divers and kids who just wanted a few seconds of attention while they did some silly dance for their buddies. Anarchy, it seemed, could work.

Show spaces were supposed to be open to everyone regardless of age, race, class, sex, or sexual preference, but for the most part it was just white kids oblivious to the privilege they came from. It also became clear to me that while these were the politics heralded by the scene, often they were not actually practiced.

practice. Mindful Acknowledgment with Children I see this scene often: a child comes to a parent visibly upset. The parent wants to make the child feel better, so he skips right to trying to fix her problem. It usually sounds like, “Why don’t we…,” or “You can just instead.” A solution is offered and the problem is solved…right? Yet with this response, parents have just missed a potent opportunity to connect. They’ve skipped over the powerful step of acknowledgment—recognizing what’s happening for the child in that moment. Acknowledgment shows that we are seeing and accepting the truth or existence of something, such as the child’s hurt feelings.

All changed! Even the thing with the spades. All of a sudden the Negroes are out of the hip scene, except for a couple of pushers like Superspade and a couple of characters like Gaylord and Heavy. The explanation around Haight-Ashbury is that Negroes don’t take to LSD. The big thing with spades on the hip scene has always been the quality known as cool. And LSD freaking well blows that whole lead shield known as cool, like it brings you right out front, hang-ups and all. Also the spades don’t get much of a kick out of the nostalgia for the mud that all the white middle-class kids who are coming to Haight-Ashbury like, piling into pads and living freaking basic, you understand, on greasy mattresses on the floor that the filthiest spade walkup in Fillmore wouldn’t have, and slopping up soda pop and shit out of the same bottle, just passing it around from mouth to mouth, not being hung up on that old American plumbing & hygiene thing, you understand, even grokking the weird medieval vermin diseases that are flashing through every groin—crab lice! you know that thing, man, where you first look down at your lower belly and see these little scars, they look like, little scabs or something, tiny little mothers, and like you pick one, root it out, and it starts crawling! Oh shit! and then they’re all crawling and you start exploring your mons pubis and your balls and they’re alive. It’s like a jungle you never saw before,

Lobsang sighed. ‘But I think I need you too, Joshua. I often think back to our days together on the Mark Twain.’ ‘Watched any old movies recently?’ ‘That’s another thing about Agnes. She won’t let me show any movies that don’t have nuns in.’ ‘Wow. That’s brutal.’ ‘Something else that’s good for me, she says. Of course there aren’t that many movies that qualify, and we watch them over and over.’ He shuddered. ‘Don’t talk to me about Two Mules for Sister Sara. But the musicals are the worst. Although Agnes says that the freezer-raiding scene in Sister Act is an authentic detail from convent life.’ ‘Well, that’s a consolation. Musicals with nuns in, huh . . .’ A voice rang out across the park, a voice Joshua remembered only too well from his own past. ‘Lobsang? Time to come in now. Your little friend will keep until tomorrow . . .’ ‘She has loudhailers everywhere.’ Lobsang shouldered his rake and sighed as they trudged across the grass. ‘You see what I’m reduced to? To think I hired forty-nine hundred monks to chant for forty-nine days on forty-nine mountain tops in stepwise Tibets, for this.’ Joshua clapped him on the shoulder. ‘It’s tough, Lobsang. She’s treating you like you’re a kid. Like you’re sixteen, going on seventeen.’ Lobsang looked at him sharply. ‘You can pack that in for a start,’ he snapped. ‘But I’ve got confidence you can overcome these difficulties, Lobsang. Just face up to every obstacle. Climb every mountain—’ Lobsang stalked off sulkily. Joshua waved cheerfully. ‘So long! Farewell!

It isn't that I like my job more than my kids overall --if I had to pick, the kids would win every time. But the "marginal value" of time with my kids declines fast. In part, this is because kids are exhausting. The first hour with them is amazing, the second less good, and by hour four I'm ready for a glass of wine or, even better, some time with my research. My job doesn't have this feature. Yes, the eighth hour is less fun than the seventh, but the highs are not as high and the lows are not as low. The physical and emotional challenges of work pale in comparison to the physical and emotional challenges of being an on-scene parent. The eighth hour at my job is better than the fifth hour with the kids on a typical day. And that is why I have a job. Because I like it.

Ehi!” sbotta lui. “Non puoi continuare a darmi il tormento solo perché non sapevo cosa fosse una diga dentale! Neanche tu lo sapevi.” “Mi hai detto che secondo te era una specie di filo interdentale sexy che la gente usava per scene di bondage nel sadomaso! Per un anno intero, dopo quella spiegazione, non sono riuscito a essere serio col dottor Kao perché me lo immaginavo sempre come una specie di eccentrico Dominatore.” E non mi aveva per niente aiutato il fatto che l’uomo in questione avesse almeno quattrocento anni e mi avesse estratto i denti del giudizio subito dopo; ero assolutamente certo di aver partecipato a qualche scena innominabile mentre dormivo sotto anestesia. “Forse lo è sul serio,” dice Otter con aria speculativa. “Ce lo vedrei bene vestito tutto di pelle.” Lo fissiamo sconcertati.

99 Problems is almost a deliberate provocation to simpleminded listeners. If that sounds crazy, you have to understand: Being misunderstood is almost a badge of honor in rap. Growing up as a black kid from the projects, you can spend your whole life being misunderstood, followed around department stores, looked at funny, accused of crimes you didn't commit, accused of motivations you don't have, dehumanized -- until you realize, one day, it's not about you. It's the perceptions people had long before you even walked onto the scene. The joke's on them because they're really just fighting phantoms of their own creation. Once you realize that, things get interesting. It's like when we were kids. You'd start bopping hard and throwing the ice grill when you step into Macy's and laugh to yourself when security guards got nervous and started shadowing you. You might have a knot of cash in your pocket, but you boost something anyway, just for the sport of it. Fuck 'em. Sometimes the mask is to hide and sometimes it's to play at being something you're not so you can watch the reactions of people who believe the mask is real. Because that's when they reveal themselves. So many people can't see that every great rapper is a not just a documentarian, but a trickster -- that every great rapper has a little bit of Chuck and a little bit of Flav in them -- but that's not our problem, it's their failure: the failure, or unwillingness, to treat rap like art, instead of acting like it's a bunch of niggas reading out of their diaries. Art elevates and refines and transforms experience. And sometimes it just fucks with you for the fun of it.

Unfortunately, he chose to put Arnold down at the one spot in town as bad as Finsterwald’s backyard—namely, Finsterwald’s front steps. When Arnold came to and discovered this, he took off like a horsefly from a swatter. As the stupefied high-schoolers were leaving the scene, they looked back. They saw the kid, cool times ten, stretch out on the forbidden steps and open his book to read. 6 About an hour later Mrs.

Stop there.” For the first time since Nora had left, Raphael spoke. Frank had been about to make another lunge, but thought better of it. His son was pointing a ten-inch carving blade at a point just below his chest. The bevel had recently been sharpened. “You little son-of-a-bitch, put that down.” But Frank didn’t move. “You aren’t hitting me anymore,” said Raphael distinctly. “You know that, don’t you?” “Boy, you got any idea what they do to a kid who runs through his own father? It don’t look good, Ralph. You don’t just get a slap on the wrist and a pat on the ass.” Still, Frank didn’t move. “You aren’t hitting me anymore,” Raphael repeated. “Go upstairs. Don’t come down.” Now, Frank had read his share of tabloids, and this scene in the kitchen must have looked like eerily familiar front-page material. When Raphael took a step forward then, leading with the tip of the blade, Frank took a step back, though this kid

I’ll say it: I am lucky enough to not have to work, in the sense that Jesse and I could change how we organize our life to live on one income. I work because I like to. I love my kids! They are amazing. But I wouldn’t be happy staying home with them. I’ve figured out that my happiness-maximizing allocation is something like eight hours of work and three hours of kids a day. It isn’t that I like my job more than my kids overall—if I had to pick, the kids would win every time. But the “marginal value” of time with my kids declines fast. In part, this is because kids are exhausting. The first hour with them is amazing, the second less good, and by hour four I’m ready for a glass of wine or, even better, some time with my research. My job doesn’t have this feature. Yes, the eighth hour is less fun than the seventh, but the highs are not as high and the lows are not as low. The physical and emotional challenges of work pale in comparison to the physical and emotional challenges of being an on-scene parent. The eighth hour at my job is better than the fifth hour with the kids on a typical day. And that is why I have a job. Because I like it. It should be okay to say this. Just like it should be okay to say that you stay home with your kids because that is what you want to do. I’m well aware that many people don’t want to be an economist for eight hours a day. We shouldn’t have to say we’re staying home for children’s optimal development, or at least, that shouldn’t be the only factor in the decision. “This is the lifestyle I prefer” or “This is what works for my family” are both okay reasons to make choices! So before you even get into reading what the evidence says is “best” for your child or thinking about the family budget, you—and your partner, or any other caregiving adults in the house—should think about what you would really like to do.

As with the first Nightmare, we shot a couple of interesting scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut, most notably one featuring a female Freddy. One of the kids in the hospital has a Freddy dream in which he’s being seduced by a sexy nurse. The nightmare evolves into a kinky S&M fantasy, but becomes less M and more S when the ropes that bind the kid to the bed become Freddy tongues, and the nurse’s face morphs into Freddy’s, but her topless torso, which features a pair of perfect Playboy breasts, remains smooth and inviting… that is, for a moment. All of a sudden, the veins in her areolas come to life and turn into Freddy-like burn scars and snake up her cleavage, past her neck, and onto her face. (I’m pretty sure Kevin enjoyed the four hours it took to apply makeup to those tits.) This troubling, erotic transformation didn’t make the final cut for some reason. Occasionally I find myself signing bootleg stills from the missing sequence. Especially in Europe. Ooh la la!

Marshall recalled that one evening he needed to talk to Charlie about a business situation, so he went over to the Mungers' June Street home. Marshall had five children of his own so he knew what a busy household was like, but even he was surprised that Charlie could concentrate under the circumstances. Charlie was sitting in a big chair, and "One kid was climbing on his shoulder, another was pulling his arm. Another was yelling. It was bedlam, but he didn't send them out or correct them. It didn't bother him a bit.

Honest question: If I am a good Christian, and have faith and stuff, will God protect my children? Honest answer: He might. Or He might not. Honest follow-up question: So what good is He? I think the answer is that He’s still good. But our safety, and the safety of our kids, isn’t part of the deal. This is incredibly hard to accept on the American evangelical church scene, because we love families, and we love loving families, and we nearly associate godliness itself with cherishing family beyond any other earthly thing. That someone would challenge this bond, the primacy of the family bond, is offensive. And yet . . . Jesus did it. And it was even more offensive, then, in a culture that wasn’t nearly so individualistic as ours. Everything was based on family: your reputation, your status—everything. And yet He challenges the idea that our attachment to family is so important, so noble, that it is synonymous with our love for Him. Which leads to some other spare thoughts, like this: we can make idols out of our families. Again, in a “Focus on the Family” subculture, it’s hard to imagine how this could be. Families are good. But idols aren’t made of bad things. They used to be fashioned out of trees or stone, and those aren’t bad, either. Idols aren’t bad things; they’re good things, made Ultimate. We make things Ultimate when we see the true God as a route to these things, or a guarantor of them. It sounds like heresy, but it’s not: the very safety of our family can become an idol. God wants us to want Him for Him, not merely for what He can provide. Here’s another thought: As wonderful as “mother love” is, we have to make sure it doesn’t become twisted. And it can. It can become a be-all, end-all, and the very focus of a woman’s existence. C. S. Lewis writes that it’s especially dangerous because it seems so very, very righteous. Who can possibly challenge a mother’s love? God can, and does, when it becomes an Ultimate. And it’s more likely to become a disordered Ultimate than many other things, simply because it does seem so very righteous. Lewis says this happens with patriotism too.

So the Germans looked down at the crowd of kids around their knees: all the village children were there, fascinated by the uniforms, the horses, the high boots. However loudly their mothers called them, they wouldn't listen. They furtively touched the heavy material of the soldiers' jackets with their dirty fingers. The Germans beckoned to them and filled their hands with sweets and coins. It felt like a normal, peaceful Sunday. The Germans added a strange note to the scene, but the essential remained unchanged, thought Lucile.

One summer in Peter’s home state, Minnesota, he worked as a puppeteer with a mobile puppet stage. He’d hitch the puppet wagon to his car and drive from park to park, entertaining kids. One day the hitch came loose and the wagon tipped over, scattering puppets all across County Road C. The police arrived to survey the scene. “The paperwork on this is going to take a while,” one of them said. Peter, nervous he was going to be late to his next gig, asked why. The cop nodded at the scattered puppet bodies. “We’ve got a lot of casualties here,” he deadpanned.

In the end, she saved me by dropping down and patting the floor, trying to coax the cat out of hiding. “Viens ici, ma petite Bisou,” she crooned. “Ma choupinette. N’aie pas peur.” Suddenly I thought of those old scenes in the Addams Family when Gomez would lose his mind when Morticia spoke French. If I never got it watching reruns as a kid, I got it now. It didn’t even matter I had no clue what she was saying. Just the words on her lips were sexy. Blair sighed and sat back on her heels, looking up at me, her lips in a pout. “She won’t come out.” Christ, she was adorable. And why was it so hot in here?

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood won four Emmy awards, and Rogers himself was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1997 Daytime Emmys, a scene that Junod describes movingly in his profile. After Fred Rogers went onstage to accept the award, he bowed and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are? . . . Ten seconds of silence.” Then, as Tom Junod recounted, “He lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, ‘I’ll watch the time,’ and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked . . . and so they did. “One second, two seconds, three seconds . . . and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, ‘May God be with you’ to all his vanquished children.

...I drag the kids to the farmers' market and fill out the week's cheap supermarket haul with a few vivid bunches of organic produce...Once home, I set out fresh flowers and put the fruit in a jadeite bowl. A jam jar of garden growth even adorns the chartreuse kids' table...I found some used toddler-sized chairs to go around it...It sits right in front of the tall bookcases...When the kids are eating or coloring there, with the cluster or mismatched picture frames hanging just to their left, my son with his mop of sandy hair, my daughter just growing out of babyhood...they look like they could be in a Scandinavian design magazine. I think to myself that maybe motherhood is just this, creating these frames, the little vistas you can take in that look like pictures from magazines, like any number of images that could be filed under familial happiness. They reflect back to you that you're doing it - doing something - right. In my case, these scenes are like a momentary vacation from the actual circumstances of my current life. Children, clean and clad in brightly striped clothing, snacking on slices of organic plum. My son drawing happy gel pen houses, the flourishing clump of smiley-faced flowers beneath a yellow flat sun. To counter the creeping worry that I am a no-good person, I must collect a lot of these images, postage-stamp moments I can gaze upon and think, I can't be fucking up that bad. Can I?

Suddenly I thought of those old scenes in the Addams Family when Gomez would lose his mind when Morticia spoke French. If I never got it watching reruns as a kid, I got it now. It didn’t even matter I had no clue what she was saying. Just the words on her lips were sexy. Blair sighed and sat back on her heels, looking up at me, her lips in a pout. “She won’t come out.” Christ, she was adorable. And why was it so hot in here? “Maybe she just needs to get acclimated. Ready to go? I could use a cold beer.” “Sure.” She took the hand I offered and rose to her feet. “Thanks. Have I told you yet how nice your manners are?” “I don’t think so.” I dropped her hand before I started kissing my way up her arm, Gomez-style.

I was certainly not the best mother. That goes without saying. I didn’t set out to be a bad mother, however. It just happened. As it was, being a bad mother was child’s play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn’t do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul. Why did I allow Grace to make Mia cry? Why did I snap at Mia to stop just to silence the noise? Why did I sneak to a quiet place, whenever I could? Why did I rush the days—will them to hurry by—so I could be alone? Other mothers took their children to museums, the gardens, the beach. I kept mine indoors, as much as I could, so we wouldn’t cause a scene. I lie awake at night wondering: what if I never have a chance to make it up to Mia? What if I’m never able to show her the kind of mother I always longed to be? The kind who played endless hours of hide-and-seek, who gossiped side by side on their daughters’ beds about which boys in the junior high were cute. I always envisioned a friendship between my daughters and me. I imagined shopping together and sharing secrets, rather than the formal, obligatory relationship that now exists between myself and Grace and Mia. I list in my head all the things that I would tell Mia if I could. That I chose the name Mia for my great-grandmother, Amelia, vetoing James’s alternative: Abigail. That the Christmas she turned four, James stayed up until 3:00 a.m. assembling the dollhouse of her dreams. That even though her memories of her father are filled with nothing but malaise, there were split seconds of goodness: James teaching her how to swim, James helping her prepare for a fourth-grade spelling test. That I mourn each and every time I turned down an extra book before bed, desperate now for just five more minutes of laughing at Harry the Dirty Dog. That I go to the bookstore and purchase a copy after unsuccessfully ransacking the basement for the one that used to be hers. That I sit on the floor of her old bedroom and read it again and again and again. That I love her. That I’m sorry. Colin

If Mamaw's second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to the neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters--about one-third--believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure--which means that a majority of white conservatives aren't certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor--which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up; His accent--clean, perfect, neutral--is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they're frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right--adversity familiar to many of us--but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we're not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren't. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we're lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it--not because we think she's wrong, but because we know she's right.

Ricky Marigold was his name up at the commune. He was seventeen, had run away from home in Pacoima and was a righteous grasshead. He wasn't a bad kid, just fucked up. He was for: love, truth, gentleness, getting high, staying high, good sounds, pleasant weather, funky clothes and rapping with his friends. He was against: Viet Nam, the Laws with their riot sticks, violence, bigotry, random hatred, nine-to-five jobs, squares who tried to get you to conform, grass full of seeds and stems, and bringdowns in general. He met Jack Gardiner on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Sunset, across from Schwab's where the starlets went to show off their asses. He saw Jack Gardiner as a little too old to be making the scene, but the guy looked flaky enough: lumberjack shirt, good beard, bright eyes; and he seemed to be friendly enough. So Ricky invited him to come along. They walked up Laurel Canyon, hunching along next to the curb on the sidewalkless street. "Gonna be a quiet scene," Ricky said. "Just a buncha beautiful people groovin' on themselves, maybe turning on, you know." The older man nodded; his hands were deep in his pants pockets. They walked quite a while, finally turning up Stone Canyon Road. A mile up the twisting road. Jack Gardiner slipped a step behind Ricky Marigold and pulled out the blade. Ricky had started to turn, just as Connie's father drove the shaft into Ricky's back, near the base of the spine. Ricky was instantly paralyzed, though not dead. He slipped to the street, and Jack Gardiner dragged him into the high weeds and junk of an empty lot. He left him there to die. Unable to speak, unable to move, Ricky Marigold found all the love draining out of him. Slowly, for six hours, through the small of his back.

I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at. I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s cheesy anthem “Proud to Be an American.” When I was sixteen, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so. To this day, I refuse to watch Saving Private Ryan around anyone but my closest friends, because I can’t stop from crying during the final scene. Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my childhood. Whenever times were tough—when I felt overwhelmed by the drama and the tumult of my youth—I knew that better days were ahead because I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices that others hadn’t. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is—a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences—I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States. I know it’s corny, but it’s the way I feel. If Mamaw’s second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.

Remember that time we got snowed in at school? Everyone had to wait for their parents to get them, but our parents didn't come." "God," I said, "I'd forgotten. Why can't I remember any of this stuff without being reminded?" "School bus driver had to take us home eventually. We were the only two kids on the bus." "I can picture us," I said, "sitting next to each other on that backseat. It's such a sad scene, really." I felt him look at me. "I don't think so. I never thought of it as sad." "But Cameron, every single kid in the school got picked up by their parents except us!" I was laughing now at the tragic ridiculousness of it. "It was pathetic!" "We head each other. I never needed anyone else. That's the difference between you and me," he said. "You need all these people around you. Your friends, your boyfriend, everyone. Every single person has to like you. I only ever needed that one person. Only ever needed you." "Not everyone has to like me," I protested. "It's just..." We'd arrived at my house. "Imagine if you'd believed I died," I said. "Trust me, you'd start to need other people. You had the luxury of always knowing I was alive, knowing where I was and what I was doing. I didn't have that, Cameron." "I didn't think of it that way when it was happening," he said. "Didn't ever think you needed me much as I needed you." "I did." "I'm sorry," he said. "But I knew you'd be okay." "How, Cameron? How did you know that?" "Look at you. From the day you marched across the school yard to talk to me," he said, starting to smile a little at the memory. "I knew you were stronger than I'd ever be." "You're the one who got yourself away from your parents in the long run. You're the one supporting yourself, being an adult." "Maybe. Hey," he said, teasing, "ain't a competition, anyway. We can both be strong." I smiled. "Yeah. Good.

Good game,” someone said, patting my shoulder. “Thanks,” I said, laughing. Then I felt arms come around me and pull me close. “Hey,” Jason said, kissing my neck before parking his chin on my shoulder. Smiling brightly, I turned around in his arms. “Great game.” “Thanks.” “You hit a home run,” I said, like maybe he hadn’t realized it. “I know it seems odd, considering how long I’ve played baseball, but I’ve never hit one before,” he said. “But I knew, I knew as soon as I felt the bat make contact with the ball, that it was going to go out of the park. I don’t know if it sounded different or felt different, but I just knew.” “You did look stunned out there.” “I was. Like I said, I’d never done that before. I mean, hitting has never been my strength.” “It was tonight.” I reached up and kissed his chin. “I need to figure out what it was I did that made me hit the home run.” “You connected the bat to the ball.” “No, it was more than that. Something I did before the game, maybe--” “No, no, no,” I said, lifting myself up onto my toes so I could look directly into his eyes. “There was no thing you did other than keeping your eye on the ball and hitting at the precise moment when the impact would send the ball over the fence.” “I’m not so sure.” “Okay, you want to know what it was? It was having me for a girlfriend--” He put his hand behind my head and kissed me to shut me up. Obviously, he didn’t think I understood the whole ritual scene, and in truth, I didn’t. I mean, sure, when I played softball, I always chewed cinnamon-flavored gum during the game, and I never started chewing until after the national anthem. But that was different. If I didn’t do that, I missed way more balls than I caught. But home runs? There was nothing that guaranteed home runs. Jason drew back. “Maybe it is having you for a girlfriend.” “I was kidding.” “I’m not.

Hey,” he said, his hand gently rubbing my back. I heard the diesel rattle of vehicles driving away from the scene. “Hey,” I replied, sitting up and looking at my watch. It was 5:00 A.M. “Are you okay?” “Yep,” he said. “We finally got it out.” Marlboro Man’s clothes were black. Heavy soot covered his drawn, exhausted face. “Can I go home now?” I said. I was only halfway kidding. And actually, I wasn’t kidding at all. “Sorry about that,” Marlboro Man said, still rubbing my back. “That was crazy.” He gave a half-chuckle and kissed my forehead. I didn’t know what to say. Driving back to his house, the pickup was quiet. My mind began to race, which is never good at five in the morning. And then, inexplicably, just as we reached the road to his house, I lost it. “So, why did you even take me there, anyway?” I said. “I mean, if I’m just going to ride in someone’s pickup, why even bring me along? It’s not like I was any help to anyone…” Marlboro Man glanced over at me. His eyes were tired. “So…did you want to operate one of the sprayers?” he asked, an unfamiliar edge to his voice. “No, I just…I mean…” I searched for the words. “I mean, that was just ridiculous! That was dangerous!” “Well, prairie fires are dangerous,” Marlboro Man answered. “But that’s life. Stuff like this happens.” I was cranky. The nap had done little to calm me down. “What happens? You just drive right into fires and throw caution to the wind? I mean, people could die out there. I could have died. You could have died! I mean, do you realize how crazy that was?” Marlboro Man looked straight ahead, rubbing his left eye and blinking. He looked exhausted. He looked spent. We arrived in his driveway just in time to see the eastern sun peeking over the horse barn. Marlboro Man stopped his pickup, put it into park, and said, still looking straight ahead, “I took you with me…because I thought you’d like to see a fire.” He turned off the pickup and opened his door. “And because I didn’t want to leave you here by yourself.” I didn’t say anything. We both exited the pickup, and Marlboro Man began walking toward his house. And then, still walking, he said it--words that chilled me to the bone. “I’ll see you later.” He didn’t even turn around. I stood there, not knowing what to say, though deep down I knew I wouldn’t have to. I knew that just as he’d always done anytime I’d ever been rendered speechless in his presence, he’d speak up, turn around, come to my rescue, hold me in his arms…and infuse love into my soul, as only he could do. He always swooped in to save me, and this time would be no different. But he didn’t turn around. He didn’t speak up. He simply walked toward the house, toward the door on his back porch--the same porch door where, hours earlier, he and I had stood in a complete fit of romance and lust, where the heat between us was but a foreshadowing of the fire waiting for us in that distant prairie.

And the wraith on the heart monitor looks pensively down at Gately from upside-down and asks does Gately remember the myriad thespian extras on for example his beloved ‘Cheers!,’ not the center-stage Sam and Carla and Nom, but the nameless patrons always at tables, filling out the bar’s crowd, concessions to realism, always relegated to back- and foreground; and always having utterly silent conversations: their faces would animate and mouths would move realistically, but without sound; only the name-stars at the bar itself could audibilize. The wraith says these fractional actors, human scenery, could be seen (but not heard) in most pieces of filmed entertainment. And Gately remembers them, the extras in all public scenes, especially like bar and restaurant scenes, or rather remembers how he doesn’t quite remember them, how it never struck his addled mind as in fact surreal that their mouths moved but nothing emerged, and what a miserable fucking bottom-rung job that must be for an actor, to be sort of human furniture, figurants the wraith says they’re called, these surreally mute background presences whose presence really revealed that the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of who’s important enough to be seen and heard v. just seen. A term from ballet, originally, figurant, the wraith explains. The wraith pushes his glasses up in the vaguely sniveling way of a kid that’s just got slapped around on the playground and says he personally spent the vast bulk of his own former animate life as pretty much a figurant, furniture at the periphery of the very eyes closest to him, it turned out, and that it’s one heck of a crummy way to try to live. Gately, whose increasing self-pity leaves little room or patience for anybody else’s self-pity, tries to lift his left hand and wiggle his pinkie to indicate the world’s smallest viola playing the theme from The Sorrow and the Pity, but even moving his left arm makes him almost faint. And either the wraith is saying or Gately is realizing that you can’t appreciate the dramatic pathos of a figurant until you realize how completely trapped and encaged he is in his mute peripheral status, because like say for example if one of ‘Cheers!’’s bar’s figurants suddenly decided he couldn’t take it any more and stood up and started shouting and gesturing around wildly in a bid for attention and nonperipheral status on the show, Gately realizes, all that would happen is that one of the audibilizing ‘name’ stars of the show would bolt over from stage-center and apply restraints or the Heineken Maneuver or CPR, figuring the silent gesturing figurant was choking on a beer-nut or something, and that then the whole rest of that episode of ‘Cheers!’ would be about jokes about the name star’s life-saving heroics, or else his fuck-up in applying the Heineken Maneuver to somebody who wasn’t choking on a nut. No way for a figurant to win. No possible voice or focus for the encaged figurant.

Your wife?” “Right.” “What does she do?” Tracy asked. “She works for a janitorial company; they clean the buildings downtown.” “She works nights?” Kins said. “Yeah.” “Do you have kids?” Tracy asked. “A daughter.” “Who watches your daughter when you and your wife are working nights?” “My mother-in-law.” “Does she stay at your house?” Tracy said. “No, my wife drops her off on her way to work.” “So nobody was at home when you got there Sunday night?” Bankston shook his head. “No.” He sat up again. “Can I ask a question?” “Sure.” “Why are you asking me these questions?” “That’s fair,” Kins said, looking to Tracy before answering. “One of our labs found your DNA on a piece of rope left at a crime scene.” “My DNA?” “It came up in the computer database because of your military service. The computer generated it, so we have to follow up and try to get to the bottom of it.” “Any thoughts on that?” Tracy said. Bankston squinted. “I guess I could have touched it when I wasn’t wearing my gloves.” Tracy looked to Kins, and they both nodded as if to say, “That’s plausible,” which was for Bankston’s benefit. Her instincts were telling her otherwise. She said, “We were hoping there’s a way we could determine where that rope was delivered, to which Home Depot.” “I wouldn’t know that,” Bankston said. “Do they keep records of where things are shipped? I mean, is there a way we could match a piece of rope to a particular shipment from this warehouse?” “I don’t know. I wouldn’t know how to do that. That’s computer stuff, and I’m strictly the labor, you know?” “What did you do in the Army?” Kins asked. “Advance detail.” “What does advance detail do?” “We set up the bases.” “What did that entail?” “Pouring concrete and putting up the tilt-up buildings and tents.” “So no combat?” Kins asked. “No.” “Are those tents like those big circus tents?” Tracy asked. “Sort of like that.” “They still hold them up with stakes and rope?” “Still do.” “That part of your job?” “Yeah, sure.” “Okay, listen, David,” Tracy said. “I know you were in the police academy.” “You do?” “It came up on our computer system. So I’m guessing you know that our job is to eliminate suspects just as much as it is to find them.” “Sure.” “And we got your DNA on a piece of rope found at a crime scene.” “Right.” “So I have to ask if you would you be willing to come in and help us clear you.” “Now?” “No. When you get off work; when it’s convenient.” Bankston gave it some thought. “I suppose I could come in after work. I get off around four. I’d have to call my wife.” “Four o’clock works,” Tracy said. She was still trying to figure Bankston out. He seemed nervous, which wasn’t unexpected when two homicide detectives came to your place of work to ask you questions, but he also seemed to almost be enjoying the interaction, an indication that he might still be a cop wannabe, someone who listened to police and fire scanners and got off on cop shows. But it was more than his demeanor giving her pause. There was the fact that Bankston had handled the rope, that his time card showed he’d had the opportunity to have killed at least Schreiber and Watson, and that he had no alibi for those nights, not with his wife working and his daughter with his mother-in-law. Tracy would have Faz and Del take Bankston’s photo to the Dancing Bare and the Pink Palace, to see if anyone recognized him. She’d also run his name through the Department of Licensing to determine what type of car he drove. “What would I have to do . . . to clear me?” “We’d like you to take a lie detector test. They’d ask you questions like the ones we just asked you—where you work, details about your job, those sorts of things.” “Would you be the one administering the test?” “No,” Tracy said. “We’d have someone trained to do that give you the test, but both Detective Rowe and I would be there to help get you set up.” “Okay,” Bankston said. “But like I said, I have

In 1991, a college sophomore studying music in the American Midwest made the mistake of selling some drugs to the wrong person. Until then, he hadn’t done much more than smoke pot and sell some of it to his friends. Petty vandalism at his high school was as high stakes as his criminal career had been. Then, as these things tend to go when you’re just 18 years old, he tried to push the envelope and test his boundaries. He started experimenting with hard drugs like LSD. But he was naive, and the brashness of youth got the best of him. He sold some of that LSD outside his circle—to an undercover policeman. And as if his luck couldn’t get worse, like a scene out of a TV movie of the week, the judge, under pressure to make an example out of this young man, sentenced him to 6 to 25 years in prison. It’s a faceless, timeless story that transcends race, class, and region. A young kid makes a mistake that forever changes their lives and their family’s lives as well. We are all too familiar with how stories like this usually end: The kid spends their most impressionable years behind bars and comes out worse than when they went in. Life on the outside is too difficult to contend with; habits learned on the inside are too difficult to shed. They reoffend; their crimes escalate. The cycle continues. This story, however, is a little different. Because this young man didn’t go back to jail. In fact, after being released in less than 5 years on good behavior, he went on to become one of the best jazz violinists in the world. He left prison with a fire lit underneath him—to practice, to repent, to humble himself, to hustle, and to do whatever it took to make something of his life. No task was too small, no gig was too tiny, no potential fan was too disinterested for him not to give it everything he had. And he did. The story is a little different for another reason, too. That young man’s name is Christian Howes. He is my older brother.

I had only been in Medomsley Detention Centre a few days when I confronted the ‘Daddy.’ It was well know that he, the Daddy, was the hardest in the place but now he had a challenger and everyone could sense it in the air that a confrontation or take over bid was on the cards. Any of you that have seen the film Scum, starring the young Ray Winstone, will be aware of what I’m on about. After a works detail in the gardens, I was one of the last back. There was big queue stood behind the Daddy while he was washing all the mud from his wellington boots with a hosepipe, and he looked to be taking his time about it as well; talk about taking the piss. The screws, as usual, were in sight and watching us out of the corner of their eyes. As I got closer, I thought I’m not standing in no fucking queue and walked straight to the front. When I got there, I snatched the hosepipe out of his hand and told him to fuck off and started to clean all the shit off my wellies. He felt humiliated and tried to grab the hose back off me, but I grabbed him by the throat and told him I was going to rip his fucking head off. As this was going down, the screws were straight on the scene and parted us. We never got done for it, which was very surprising. He did say to people that he wanted to fight me, but in reality, when I confronted him, he cocked off and there was a new kid on the block. I was the Daddy.

There’s another thing about New York: the bar scene and the restaurant scene for the ‘kids,’” adds Brian Cohen. “There’s no better place to hang out than in New York. The city’s environment is so much more conducive to that. You can’t do that in Silicon Valley. You can’t walk from San Mateo to Mountain View, you know? If you’re in the city, you may go to 12 different bars, hang out with 40 different friends … it’s another matter. I think the real catalyst is that New York is totally walkable, you can walk anywhere, and every place is safe. Where would you go to live this life? Nowhere.” But even Cohen is worried about the after-Bloomberg: “There’s no businessman who could fit in his shoes. I think New York is going to go through a difficult time then. He’s had an impact in ways people have no understanding of. That will be gone.

Stuyvesant Town also was a safe haven, yielding a community of loyal, lifelong friends. As kids, we would hang out at the playgrounds until it was too dark to see. Later, we shared the raptures and torments of adolescence in a wild 1960s New York City scene. With numerous temptations and very few limits, we hung together and guided one another through many storms. Maybe that’s why I have always found comfort in community. Whether in newsrooms, campaigns, or the White House, I have thrived in communal settings, finding emotional nourishment in the friendships and camaraderie of the team.

While Prowse, given his penchant for revealing secrets, was kept in the dark, Hamill was debriefed by Lucas and then Kershner, who called over the actor not long before cameras rolled: “I met with Mark, and said, ‘Uh, you know that Darth Vader’s your father.’ ‘Wha—?’ ‘David Prowse will be saying stuff that doesn’t count, forget it. Use your own rhythm compared to what he’s doing.’ ” “They took me aside and said, ‘This is what he’s going to say,’ ” Hamill says. “ ‘You don’t know the truth, Obi-Wan killed your father.’ ” “I told Mark, ‘Don’t tell anybody—especially don’t tell David Prowse—but I want you to be able to know, to be able to act appropriately,’ ” Lucas says. “And then Kersh worked the scene with him.” “I love when Darth Vader says, ‘The only way you’ll ever beat me is with hate,’ ” Kershner says. “It’s a lie and the kids know it. The last thing Ben says is, ‘Remember, don’t use hate.’ It’s the most important thing in the film.

The empty, hollow sound of her laughter spoke of her despair. “I was raised that good girls get married and have kids. They do what their husbands say, make sure the meals are on the table.” She wiped angrily at her uninjured eye. “I thought I was doing what I was supposed to. I thought that was what love was.” Her words hit Chris in the gut. How was what he was doing any different? He had this picture in his head of what love and a relationship were supposed to look like. But looking at this broken and battered woman, she had the picture-perfect life. The ideal. And behind the scenes there was nothing idyllic about it. This woman would be better off alone. It was sad the things people were willing to accept trying to hold on to a dream. Hell, he didn’t even know if the dream existed.

The title is “I am not the sexist pig you are looking for”. He is merely attempting to state that he is not a sexist pig right? Until one understands the cultural reference to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Then his insidious plan is revealed! Muahahaha! Just kidding. But it does resemble a striking similarity to a scene on Tatooine. The scene where Master Obi-wan “Ben” Kenobi uses the force and tells the Stormtroopers “these are the not the droids you are looking for” The odd thing in this scene is that they were the droids that the Empire was looking for. After the comments Mr. Harris made and the obvious lack of scientific credibility in his statements, the writers are betting he wished he had the force and mind trick.

God reflected back on a scene that he witnessed at Sodom, which had become too typical. A man entered a house, sat down in a chair, and quietly waited. Two children sat on the opposite side of the room. They stared at the man with their chins on their fists. The man stood up to move a foot rest close to the kids. He leaned forward to quietly explain, “I am here… to make… sweet love… to your daddy’s ass. Now listen… children… you might hear some… raucous noise… from that room… down that hall,” the man pointed towards the last door down a hall, “But don’t… be… alarmed. That’s just the sound… of two men… enjoying… the company of each other.

It wasn’t hard to imagine the scene. Night, probably. The killers force the lock, at the other end of the large house, and enter. It’s maybe two, three o’clock in the morning; they think Luc Szpilman is alone and asleep. But—surprise—the kid is right in front of them, sitting on the couch with his girlfriend, rolling a joint, which was still there on the coffee table in the living room. Luc suddenly recognizes one of them, the guy in combat boots who’d come for the film. The kids panic, try to run away. The killers catch them and stab them in the back, once, twice. And then that inexplicable frenzy. Lucie and the police remained frozen in place, keeping their own thoughts.

In this way, we make a molehill out of a mountain, leaving for the child a mix of toys that they enjoy most consistently, and for the longest periods of time. Rarely are these favorites complex, or motorized; rarely do they “do” anything. The toys that are too detailed or complicated—too “fixed”—can rob a child of an imaginative experience. Dear nighttime toys can never disappear. Even if they are totally hideous, dear nighttime toys are nonnegotiable. The remaining toys have to include a mixture of active toys: building, digging, construction toys; and more receptive toys, such as dolls and stuffed animals, toys that just receive. There can also be creative materials, such as paints, crayons, and some modeling substances, such as beeswax or clay. The toys with staying power are usually—not always, but pretty consistently—figures of some sort, either dolls or knights or stuffed animals; building toys; and scenes or dwellings of some sort, into which the child loves to project his or her figures, and thus themselves.

What happened to the troubled young reporter who almost brought this magazine down The last time I talked to Stephen Glass, he was pleading with me on the phone to protect him from Charles Lane. Chuck, as we called him, was the editor of The New Republic and Steve was my colleague and very good friend, maybe something like a little brother, though we are only two years apart in age. Steve had a way of inspiring loyalty, not jealousy, in his fellow young writers, which was remarkable given how spectacularly successful he’d been in such a short time. While the rest of us were still scratching our way out of the intern pit, he was becoming a franchise, turning out bizarre and amazing stories week after week for The New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone— each one a home run. I didn’t know when he called me that he’d made up nearly all of the bizarre and amazing stories, that he was the perpetrator of probably the most elaborate fraud in journalistic history, that he would soon become famous on a whole new scale. I didn’t even know he had a dark side. It was the spring of 1998 and he was still just my hapless friend Steve, who padded into my office ten times a day in white socks and was more interested in alphabetizing beer than drinking it. When he called, I was in New York and I said I would come back to D.C. right away. I probably said something about Chuck like: “Fuck him. He can’t fire you. He can’t possibly think you would do that.” I was wrong, and Chuck, ever-resistant to Steve’s charms, was as right as he’d been in his life. The story was front-page news all over the world. The staff (me included) spent several weeks re-reporting all of Steve’s articles. It turned out that Steve had been making up characters, scenes, events, whole stories from first word to last. He made up some funny stuff—a convention of Monica Lewinsky memorabilia—and also some really awful stuff: racist cab drivers, sexist Republicans, desperate poor people calling in to a psychic hotline, career-damaging quotes about politicians. In fact, we eventually figured out that very few of his stories were completely true. Not only that, but he went to extreme lengths to hide his fabrications, filling notebooks with fake interview notes and creating fake business cards and fake voicemails. (Remember, this was before most people used Google. Plus, Steve had been the head of The New Republic ’s fact-checking department.) Once we knew what he’d done, I tried to call Steve, but he never called back. He just went missing, like the kids on the milk cartons. It was weird. People often ask me if I felt “betrayed,” but really I was deeply unsettled, like I’d woken up in the wrong room. I wondered whether Steve had lied to me about personal things, too. I wondered how, even after he’d been caught, he could bring himself to recruit me to defend him, knowing I’d be risking my job to do so. I wondered how I could spend more time with a person during the week than I spent with my husband and not suspect a thing. (And I didn’t. It came as a total surprise). And I wondered what else I didn’t know about people. Could my brother be a drug addict? Did my best friend actually hate me? Jon Chait, now a political writer for New York and back then the smart young wonk in our trio, was in Paris when the scandal broke. Overnight, Steve went from “being one of my best friends to someone I read about in The International Herald Tribune, ” Chait recalled. The transition was so abrupt that, for months, Jon dreamed that he’d run into him or that Steve wanted to talk to him. Then, after a while, the dreams stopped. The Monica Lewinsky scandal petered out, George W. Bush became president, we all got cell phones, laptops, spouses, children. Over the years, Steve Glass got mixed up in our minds with the fictionalized Stephen Glass from his own 2003 roman à clef, The Fabulist, or Steve Glass as played by Hayden Christiansen in the 2003

One of the best romances I’ve read lately had the parents of the guy being in law enforcement and the parents of the girl being criminals. There was a scene where the kids are being introduced for the first time and the boy’s father’s tracking dog wouldn’t stop barking because the girl’s mother is wearing the same shoes she had on when cutting into a vault.

– there was a whole load of inner-London kids just like us, who wanted to go out.’ That state of affairs was perfect for sound systems: business opportunity meets social exclusion meets musical potential. Forced to forget about West End clubs or plush suburban discos, London’s black soul scene became self-contained, vaguely outlaw, community-based, ever-innovative, and in complete empathy with its crowds.

everyone’s like, “Road trip!” and the next scene

When I was a kid, I hated the mask of adulthood. And I was threatened by it.

A rather ordinary scene, but nothing about it was ordinary. It wasn’t an ordinary school. He wasn’t an ordinary teacher. It wasn’t even an ordinary window. It had been replaced with bulletproof glass after the remodel about a decade before.

nerdier, more sensitive bunch who weren’t interested in perpetuating the malice and exclusion they had felt growing up. “People made me feel bad when I was a kid,” says Pedersen, “so why would I want to go out of my way to make people feel rotten, like somehow they don’t belong or they don’t cut the mustard?

they weren’t kids anymore—they were pushing thirty; even more important, Lunsford had become a proud papa in 1990. “I had to say, ‘What are my primary commitments?’ ” he says. “Being in a seriously touring rock & roll band is difficult to do as a parent.

Why do you give a shit about him?” my kids would ask. “It’s his deal, not yours,” they’d say. “I’m not going to talk about this anymore,” I would reply. “It’s repetitive.” So the subject would be dropped because my family didn’t have the wherewithal to resist me—or to save me. It wasn’t just as if I was an alcoholic or a drug addict refusing to get help. It was exactly that. I was an addict unable to stop myself from drinking or popping pills or shooting heroin into my veins. Worse, I brought my addiction home, constantly shouting on the phone to reporters and publishers when I should have been having a quiet breakfast with my children or a walk in the park. I never, ever, ever got through an entire meal in a restaurant with my wife without being interrupted by Trump. He’d call to ask a favor, or have me make a call on his behalf, or just to complain and rant. My family hated it when I picked up his calls, as I always did, no matter the hour or the circumstances. I was always pressing his message, always pressing his message, always pressing his message. What I really needed was an intervention, but my wife and kids and parents and friends didn’t know how to stage such a scene, or how I would react. “Badly,” was the short answer, in hindsight, as it would likely have provoked me to go further and further into the madness, as I gradually and then rapidly took leave of my senses.

And then you arrive on the scene, Baby Willis. A little tiny Kung Fu Boy. And for a moment the backstories and fragments and scenes filled with background players and nonspeaking parts, it all makes a kind of sense, all of it leading to this. A family. They bring you home from the hospital, at which point everything speeds up. It’s a montage of first moments, all of the major and minor milestones: first step, first word, first time sleeping through the night. There are a few years in a family when, if everything goes right, the parents aren’t alone anymore, they’ve been raising their own companion, the kid who’s going to make them less alone in the world and for those years they are less alone. It’s a blur—dense, raucous, exhausting—feelings and thoughts all jumbled together into days and semesters, routines and first times, rolling along, rambling along, summer nights with all the windows open, lying on top of the covers, and darkening autumn mornings when no one wants to get out of bed, getting ready, getting better at things, wins and losses and days when it doesn’t go anyone’s way at all, and then, just as chaos begins to take some kind of shape, present itself not as a random series of emergencies and things you could have done better, the calendar, the months and years and year after year, stacked up in a messy pile starts to make sense, the sweetness of it all, right at that moment, the first times start turning into last times, as in, last first day of school, last time he crawls into bed with us, last time you’ll all sleep together like this, the three of you. There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.

Michelle, the girls, and I visited a sprawling favela on the western end of Rio, where we dropped in at a youth center to watch a capoeira troupe perform and I kicked a soccer ball around with a handful of local kids. By the time we were leaving, hundreds of people had massed outside the center, and although my Secret Service detail nixed the idea of me taking a stroll through the neighborhood, I persuaded them to let me step through the gate and greet the crowd. Standing in the middle of the narrow street, I waved at the Black and brown and copper-toned faces; residents, many of them children, clustered on rooftops and small balconies and pressed against the police barricades. Valerie, who was traveling with us and witnessed the whole scene, smiled as I walked back inside, saying, “I’ll bet that wave changed the lives of some of those kids forever.” I wondered if that was true. It’s what I had told myself at the start of my political journey, part of my justification to Michelle for running for president—that the election and leadership of a Black president stood to change the way children and young people everywhere saw themselves and their world. And yet I knew that whatever impact my fleeting presence might have had on those children of the favelas and however much it might cause some to stand straighter and dream bigger, it couldn’t compensate for the grinding poverty they encountered every day: the bad schools, polluted air, poisoned water, and sheer disorder that many of them had to wade through just to survive. By my own estimation, my impact on the lives of poor children and their families so far had been negligible—even in my own country. My time had been absorbed by just trying to keep the circumstances of the poor, both at home and abroad, from worsening: making sure a global recession didn’t drastically drive up their ranks or eliminate whatever slippery foothold they might have in the labor market; trying to head off a change in climate that might lead to a deadly flood or storm; or, in the case of Libya, trying to prevent a madman’s army from gunning people down in the streets. That wasn’t nothing, I thought—as long as I didn’t start fooling myself into thinking it was anywhere close to enough.

I know we can’t be what we can’t see, so the more I could do to help them focus on the reality of their dreams, the more I was being of service to my kids.

time. I was staring at some hungry, desperate kids who didn’t want to stay stuck where they were but didn’t know how to get out.

When my parents met in the early 1960s, my father was already married with six kids, all under eighteen, living in the Lafayette Gardens projects in Bed-Stuy.

Head or Flat Top. I thought of him as this locked box, shut down, guarded. There was something hard and unknowable about him. Kids learn, whether they

I’d wear clothes she made, things like a bow tie, vest, and short pants. In first grade, two kids jumped me in a bathroom stall, and in order to break free I clocked one in the head with my metal Snoopy lunchbox, cutting his face open. The next day, the father brought his son into the class. At the front of the

classroom, he said, “Point him out, son.” As though in slow motion, the kid raised a finger at me. “Okay,” the father said. “Go kick his ass.

You too dumb to be up there?” The taunting got so bad that I started acting out. If kids don’t get positive attention, they reach for the negative kind. And I was no different. The last straw was in third grade when a female teacher bent in front of me and, like a knucklehead, I smacked her behind. That was the end for me

I was more of a follower, doing what I could to fit in, and the kids with swagger were like magnets to me. I got into trouble for little things like truancy and jumping turnstiles, smoking weed on the train. I wanted to be liked more than I didn’t want to do things, so I just went along.

I was a stoop boy, as opposed to a corner boy, so I stayed on the courtyard. I was left to find my place among the younger kids and the girls. I was looking to belong, to feel like I mattered. And those desires—for a family, for a place where I felt valued—drew me to Joanie. Joanie and I grew up together—her grandmother would babysit us—but around the time high school started, I decided I liked her.